It wurk fan Gysbert Japix n-2 - Tresoar

Momus be associated with work of literary quality? And did GJ employ them to exclude
misunderstandings about the nature of his Frisian book straight away?
Friesche Tjerne (I 1-6)
The poem can be classified as belonging to the epithalamion genre. It seems to
have been conditioned not by thepraecepta, but by the exempla. The genre has been
utilized, so to speak, in order to realize a playful poem which closely links up with
comical nuptial songs in dialect, of which so many find a place in seventeenth Century
song books. Yet, the text is not a farce. Tjerne may be a farmer, it is true, but he is
special in that he evokes an idyll by breaking class-distinctions. This idyll assumes
an appearance of reality through its setting in time and place: Bolsward and vicinity
about 1640.
Tjerne and Sjolle Kreamer of presumably the same time are probably GJ's earliest
Frisian texts. Of particular importance for the origin of his writing Frisian verse
seems to be the re-edition in 1639 of two entertaining Frisian dialogues by Van Hichtum
from 1609.
Sjolle Kreamer (I 7-12)
With its song and its dialogue form the poem can formally be considered as a variant
of the pastoral genre. Also with respect to content there is a relation, because the
otium is an important motif.
Ljeafde (I 13-14)
The text, consisting of a song and a quatrain, is a love poem in Petrarchist style for
the personifïed Love in 1 John 4:8. Besides differences in content concerning human
knowledge of Love and the ability of doing it justice, it differs from its possible models
by its concrete representation of the personifïed character.
Reontse Ljeafde-Gâl (I 15-16)
In form of a love song, the poem is a political allegory on the Act of Seclusion
(1654). As an adaptation of a Frisian national-historic motif and as a rejection of a
republican concept of the state it is part of the provincial court culture.
Herders Ljeafde to Galathaæa (I 17-18)
The poem is a pastoral song in which the shepherdess to whom the fïrst-person
narrator professes his love, personifïes a Christian ideal. GJ's employing pastoral
characters is probably related to pastoral tendencies in the Frisian court culture,
which begin to become fashionable in the 1640s.
Reamer in Sape (I 56-63)
The poem shows in the depiction of two characters what contentment can achieve.
Despite the literary tradition which characterizes its contents, it is difficult to assume
that the poem has no bearing on contemporaneous events. For this, the similarities
with the problems in church and state in Friesland are too striking. This holds par-
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